Faced With Catholic/GOP Uprising, Dems Kill Pro-Choice Bill

The Denver Post'sKurtis Leereports on drama yesterday in the Colorado Senate over Senate Bill 14-175, the Reproductive Health Freedom Act. After several days of intense controversy, what was once an important bill for at least some Democrats to close out this year's legislative session is now dead–and the finger-pointing is well underway:

Rather than battle Republicans over a proposal they stressed would help protect reproductive rights, Senate Democrats on Wednesday spiked the legislation — a move that drew applause from some religious groups packed into the chamber's gallery who strongly opposed it…

All Senate Republicans, alongside the Archdiocese of Denver, denounced the legislation as "overreaching" and "ambiguous," saying the measure was not needed.

"It's a solution in search of a problem," said Sen. Bernie Herpin, R-Colorado Springs. "There is no one, no evidence, that has said there's a denial of things like contraception to women in Colorado."

Sen. Andy Kerr, D-Lakewood, who sponsored the measure, said he carried it because constituents expressed at town halls and forums concerns over efforts in other states to make it more difficult for women to seek guidance on abortions and receive common forms of contraception.

From Senate President Morgan Carroll's statement after Senate Bill 175 was killed:

We were optimistic that the Republicans would come on board with a proposal that would ensure all women are able to make private and personal reproductive health decisions with freedom from government interference. But we are disappointed that we were unable to get bi-partisan support to acknowledge and uphold the values of the majority of Coloradans.

With 21 days left in the legislative session and 269 bills still pending, having a GOP filibuster would bring D.C. style dysfunction to Colorado. We have made our point and in the interest of getting the remaining work done, on education, jobs, higher education affordability and childcare, we laid the bill over.

We will continue to fight against attacks on women and their private healthcare decisions and uphold the values of Colorado women and families.

Amid growing protests led in large part by the Catholic Church, the Colorado Senate on April 16 killed a controversial bill that could have banned all pro-life laws in the state…

Originally introduced March 31, the controversial bill – S.B. 175 – only gained wide publicity last week. It sought to ban all new pro-life laws and regulations, including requirements for pre-abortion ultrasounds and restrictions on the RU-486 abortion drug.

With the bill now dead, there are reporters and Republicans who say this was a "quixotic effort"–but clearly the bill's religious opponents didn't agree while they massed crowds at the Capitol to oppose it. Proponents point to new restrictions on abortion being passed around the nation, as well as other so-called "pre-emptive" bills, like a bill signed in Oklahoma just this week that pre-emptively bans future minimum wage increases and paid sick day laws, to justify both the intent and functional precedent for the Reproductive Health Freedom Act.

It's our understanding and has been reported, though victorious Republicans deny it today, that threats were leveled by the Senate Minority to bring the entire chamber to a halt for the rest of the legislative session if Senate Bill 175 passed–which could have endangered dozens of important bills. The fact is, Democrats are on solid ground, given the polling on the abortion issue and the overwhelming defeat of abortion ban initiatives in Colorado, pushing a bill to affirmatively protect reproductive choice rights. For that reason alone, predictions that the defeat of Senate Bill 175 has major ramifications seem overblown–certainly not to the degree that Republicans harmed themselves by killing the popular civil unions bill two years ago. In the eyes of voters, questions about efficacy and timing aside, Democrats were on the right side of the issue.

If anything? If you have to take on the Catholic Church, Holy Week might not be the best timing…

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You can try to spin this all you want, Colorado Pols. Democrats went too far and awakened the sleeping giant: not gun owners this time, but pro-life Christians. Gun owners know protesting against the ruling Democrat Party is useless, and they're waiting until November to make their voices heard at the ballot box. But it's been awhile since pro-life Christians stood up to Democrat bullying. I'm very proud of them!!

The only thing I agree with is that Holy Week was a terrible time to attack pro-life Christians. That shows me how little regard Democrats have for people of faith.

Get used to losing Democrats! Next year, you won't have a majority at all.

Once Denver’s Archbishop and Republicans took note of it, Senate Bill 175 was exposed as an policy idea hatched in fantasyland, a quixotic effort to legislate not just into the future but forever and a blatant ploy to appeal to women at the end of this election-year legislative session.

"Any tax increase must be approved by the voters via the initiative process."

Ensuring women's access to contraception in the future would have been appropriate, and would have fit Colorado's history as the first state to make abortion legal in cases of rape and incest. Colorado has always led in women's reproductive choice. This bill would have continued that tradition.

I have to say that I don't get the purpose of this bill beyond, as its sponsor notes, reacting to actions in other more conservative states.

At the state level, this bill would have done effectively nothing – if the legislature has enough votes to write new restrictions in the future, simply passing those new restrictions is sufficient to override this bill. At the local level I'm less sure, but it seems to me that Colorado's state laws might already cover it. Certainly we haven't seen much in the way of action from local jurisdictions.

So for all that it brought the Republican anti-choicers out of the woodwork to defeat it, I don't know that it makes much of a difference, or that it was much more than a knee-jerk reaction to other states' conservatives in the first place.